International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Current Issue

The construction of the Yeni Valide Mosque complex, located on the northern edge of Istanbul’s historical peninsula in the district of Eminönü, began in 1597 under the patronage of Sultan Mehmed III’s mother Safiye Sultan. The project was halted abruptly in 1603 at the foundation phase and stood dormant for almost six decades. Between 1661 and 1663, another royal woman patron, Valide Hatice Turhan, supported the revision and completion of the project. Although scholars have long examined the construction process, architecture, and decoration of the project in detail, I reevaluate our knowledge of the monument based on recent scientific discoveries regarding the climate change phenomenon known as the ‘Little Ice Age’, which reached its peak in the seventeenth century. As we address another major climate change event today, this study provides insight into our understanding of the social, cultural, and historical impacts of such dramatic changes to climate conditions on architectural projects and urban dynamics in the Ottoman Empire.

As part of an indigenous building movement in the Global South, the United Nations published two books by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–89): one on building ‘for the poor’ and the other on passive cooling in vernacular architecture from hot environments. Using his correspondence, reports, designs, published writings, and built forms, this article tracks Fathy’s changing use of a crucial technique, mud-brick vaulting, that he learned in Nubia, an area of Egypt’s arid south largely destroyed by dams in the twentieth century. I show how Fathy mined Nubia rhetorically and materially to use, and later attempt to copyright, its residents’ ‘instinctive’ skills for living in hot arid lands. Over time, Fathy’s appropriations helped to transform Nubia’s vernacular morphology into a universal commons of desert and ‘Islamic’ forms, which enabled him to expand the geographic scope of his practice into the Arabian Peninsula in Oman and Saudi Arabia and into the southwestern United States.

A montage in Syrian filmmaker and activist Omar Amiralay’s Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) juxtaposes the dam’s industrial machinery with an eighteenth-centurybcelimestone statue of the goddess Ishtar, excavated from the Syrian site of Mari on the Euphrates River and known as the déesse au vase jaillissant (goddess with a flowing vase). This article analyses Amiralay’s visual and semiotic conflation of the dam’s architectural infrastructure and the déesse, raising questions regarding the politics of preservation under the Syrian Assad family regime (1971–present). Amiralay’s film valorises industrial labour while presenting a view of the rural lifeways that surround the Euphrates through the lens of salvage ethnography, suggesting that the advent of the dam will render these rural ways obsolete. The documentary records the months before over 60,000 people evacuated the region that would soon become the dam’s reservoir, Lake Assad. I argue that, read alongside film and literature that recentres the dam’s displaced (al-maghmurin; the drowned), Film Essay offers a counter-narrative to the ‘climate thesis’ of the Syrian Civil War (2011–present) and ties the conflict to longer histories of false promises and political subjugation embodied by the Tabqa Dam project.

Halil Altındere proposes in his video Space Refugee (2016) that Syrian refugees resettle on Mars to escape the dire environmental and political circumstances of Earth. Through a visual analysis of the Martian landscapes and built environments featured in Altındere’s video, I examine how the artist evokes the overlapping visual languages and rhetorical devices used to frame the construction of real and imagined cities in the UAE and on Mars. I argue that Altındere’s Martian landscape brings together features of Gulf modernism in Dubai and Abu Dhabi with elements of historical Islamicate architectures to imagine a Martian modernism that subverts repressive conditions on earth and offers social transformation. I theorize and contextualize Altındere’s vision of a utopian Martian life for Syrian refugees through the framework of Martian modernism. This critical lens elucidates how the visual features, living conditions, and ideological motivations of the future imagined in Space Refugee are shaped by and respond to intersecting histories of modernity, coloniality, architectural development, extraterrestrial exploration, science fiction, and climate change.

Review of: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973, Ayala Levin (2022)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 320 pp., 53 b&w and 16 colour illus.,

ISBN: 9781478015260, $107 (hardback)

Review of: A Culture of Building: Courtyard Houses in the Old City of Aleppo, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Dima Dayoub, Ruba Kasmo, and Anne Mollenhauer (2023)

Beirut: al Ayn, 591 pp. (2 vols), 1000 b&w illus.,

ISBN: 9789953058788, €55 (paperback)

Review of: Historic Mosques in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Timbuktu to Zanzibar, Stéphane Pradines (2022)

Leiden: Brill, 350 pp., 213 colour illus.,

ISBN: 9789004445543, $179 (hardback)